Portraits of Mind: music by Ian Venables, Ralph Vaughan Williams & George Butterworth in a glorious celebration of Venables’ 70th birthday at Temple Music

Temple Church

Ian Venables: Out of the Shadows, Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on Greensleeves, On Wenlock Edge, Love Bade me Welcome, Butterworth: Love Blows as the Wind Blows, Ian Venables: Portraits of Mind; Gwilym Bowen, Gareth Brynmor John, William Vann, Navarra Quartet; Temple Music Foundation at Temple Church
Reviewed 4 November 2025

A celebration of Ian Venables’ 70th birthday, a generous programme gave us a chance to hear his wonderful Portraits of Mind alongside the RVW work for which it is a companion, On Wenlock Edge

Temple Music‘s concert at the Temple Church on Tuesday 4 November 2025 brought together a number of threads. For one, it was a celebration of the 70th birthday of composer Ian Venables with a programme that included two of his song cycles. The evening began with the London premiere of Venables’ Out of the Shadows which was commissioned by Robert Venables KC who is a Bencher of Middle Temple and the cycle celebrates Robert Venables’ 30th anniversary with his partner Gary Morris. Ian Venables’ second work of the evening was Portraits of a Mind which was commissioned by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth and was intended as a companion piece for RVW’s On Wenlock Edge. In a generous programme at Temple Church we heard On Wenlock Edge along with George Butterworth’s cycle Love blows as the Wind Blows.

The performers were tenor Gwilym Bowen (standing in for Alessandro Fisher at a few days notice), baritone Gareth Brynmor John, pianist William Vann and the Navarra String Quartet (Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Eva Aronian, Sascha Bota, Brian O’Kane).

Written for baritone (Gareth Brynmor John) and piano trio (Eva Aronian, Brian O’Kane, William Vann), Venables’ Out of the Shadows is intended by the composer to ‘focus on various aspects of male love’. His selection of poems from Constantine Cavafy (in English translation), Horatio Brown, Tennyson, JA Symonds and Edward Perry Warren rather brought the out the idea also of the gay male gaze.

At the cafe door by Egyptian-born Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) is a celebration of the sight of a beautiful young man which Bored by Scottish poet and historian Horatio Brown (1854-1926) features a narrator bored at a posh social occasion constantly reiterating ‘I liked their footman, John, the best’. Returning to Cavafy, The mirror in the hall was another celebration of male beauty, briefly glimpsed. The three verses from Tennyson’s In memoriam are bleaker, the poet gazing on the house where ‘he’ is not there. JA Symonds’ translation from the Greek Anthology, Love’s Olympian Laughter gives us few details beyond the sheer joyful celebration of a young man in love. The cycle ends with Body and Soul by American millionaire and author Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928), a poem that celebrates love in an ideal form.

The songs were very much about lovely, sometime luscious instrumental textures surrounding quite plain, direct vocal lines that prioritised the words. Gareth Brynmor John sang with an admirably vibrant directness and a superb projection of the poetry. The long-limbed lines of At the cafe door moved from the contemplative to something more outgoing with intense moments, reflecting a fleeting moment rather than an encounter. The busy textures of Bored implied constant forward motion, with sly harmonies in the mobile instrumental textures. Venables treated the poem entirely seriously but I felt that the refrain of ‘I liked their footman, John, the best’ could have benefited from a little more wit, there is something slyly camp about the remark. The mirror in the hall moved from the evocative to something approaching a dance when the lovely young man looks in the mirror. Here John did bring out the sly storyline, and as with the first Cavafy setting this was simply a moment, everything evaporated at the end.

In memoriam which moved from slow narration to something more intense, tightened the screw gradually with John bringing out the sense of the effort it took the poet to move on (the poem is about Tennyson’s grief at the death of a friend). Love’s Olympian Laughter had a lively mobile texture, but seemed to take the poem a tad too seriously and I wanted a little more fun in the song. Finally the calm unfolding lines of Body and Soul leading to an affirmative climax and then a slow unwinding.

Following this, as something of a palate cleanser, we heard William Vann’s rather effective arrangement of RVW’s Fantasia on Greensleeves for piano quintet, with Vann giving the piano a discreet role in supporting the rich string textures.

Tenor Gwilym Bowen joined the instrumentalists for Vaughan William’s On Wenlock Edge, his 1909 cycle of songs based on poems from AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, the collection of lyrical poems published originally in 1896 but whose themes took on greater resonance during the Boer War and World War I.

On Wenlock Edge began with the instrumentalists giving the music a fast, vivid edge which was matched by the intensity and vibrancy of Bowen’s tone. RVW’s atmospheric instrumental writing was terrific here complementing the way Bowen leaned into the drama. From far, from eve and morning was more relaxed, the performers suggesting that they had all the time in the world. Bowen brought flurries of intensity to the middle verse but overall this was about relaxed beauty. RVW’s instrumental writing seems to show distinct signs of the influence he picked up from his lessons with Ravel. Bowen brought out the contrast between the two voices, the dead man relaxed but direct, the living one vibrant and intense. The dead man’s final verse was full of vibrant anxiety, but Bowen made the living man’s response seem almost pleased with himself that he had taken his dead friend’s sweetheart.

The lovely instrumental textures of Bredon Hill set off the relaxed directness of Bowen’s delivery with strongly project words. The vibrant climax had Vann bringing out the ‘noisy bells’ on the piano, whilst the final verses were bleak and contained, leading to the noisy bells in the final verse along with Bowen’s remarkably intense delivery. Clun flowed effortlessly, but Bowen’s tone here was vivid, the words pointed even when the final verses unwound to the more mysterious.

There was a sense in this performance of Bowen and the instrumentalists bringing a fresh ear to the cycle, not simply reworking previous interpretations. I found the results fresh and intriguing indeed.

After the interval, William Vann and Gareth Brynmor John gave us a thoughtful account of Love bade me welcome from the Five Mystical Songs. John brought out the narrative in George Herbert’s poem giving us vibrant tone in the final verse. Thanks to Vann’s fine piano playing, I did not miss the orchestral contribution but I did rather feel the lack of the choir.

George Butterworth’s song cycle Love Blows as the Wind Blows was written in 1911-12, a period after he left Oxford when he was writing criticism, composing and teaching. The cycle was written around the time of, or just after, Butterworth’s settings of poems from A Shropshire Lad. The poems are by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), remembered for his 1875 poem Invictus, and thanks to the amputation of part of his left leg, the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883).

Butterworth set the cycle for baritone and string quartet (though there is also a version for voice and piano, and one with small orchestra). It is difficult to see why Butterworth set these somewhat old-fashioned poems or what the theme of the cycle is. In the year that’s come and gone had folk-ish hints in the vocal line with rather mobile string textures, the poem speaking about being content to live together. Life in her creaking shoes has the refrain ‘love blows as the wind blows’ which gives the cycle its title, find love where you can. Here we had atmospheric strings and vibrant voice, the whole having a poetic feel. There was an interesting pull between hurrying forward and holding back in Butterworth’s music. Fill a glass with golden wine had a poetic lyrical lilt to it, the words saying enjoy the moment but Butterworth’s music highlighting the melancholy behind the liveliness. On the way to Kew was all flowing narrative and mobile strings, and the hints of RVW were very present here. I have to confess that I rather found the poem curious [see it on lieder.net].

I enjoyed Venables’ Portraits of Mind when I first heard it in Alessandro Fisher, William Vann and the Navarra Quartet’s 2023 recording for Albion Records [see my review] so I was very pleased to be able to heard it live for the first time. Venables explains his selection of poetry, “I wanted to explore the principal elements that informed his [Vaughan Williams’] creativity and so ‘paint’ a musical portrait in which each song reflects a different aspect of his creative mind.”

His selection begins with George Meredith’s The Lark Ascending which inspired RVW’s work of the same name, and is followed by Ursula Vaughan Williams’ Man makes delight his own, then Robert Louis Stevenson’s From a Railway Carriage and Christina Rossetti’s Echo, and finally Walt Whitman’s A Clear Midnight. There are RVW links beyond the Meredith. Ursula Vaughan Williams was, of course, RVW’s wife whilst Stevenson and Rossetti were both poets whom RVW set in his early mature songs, and Whitman’s work threads its way throughout RVW’s output.

RVW never set Meredith’s The Lark Ascending, it is a very long poem. Here, Venables sets an excerpt but we first hear a singing violin melody over murmuring strings. Gwilym Bowen gave us a carefully shaped line, undulating melismatic sections contrasting with a vibrant edge in the tone. The middle was faster, more eager but the quietly intimate end led to rhapsodic climax. Man makes delight his own had Vann’s gentle piano complementing Bowen’s affecting high tenor. As the pace sped up there were intriguing shadows in the climax, but the conclusion was intimate with both words and music being affecting. The vivid words of From a railway carriage sped by wonderfully, with Venables giving us hints of the exotic in the music. Echo began atmospheric, concentrated and positively hypnotic though the conclusion to the first verse was powerfully intense. The middle verse was more concentrated, with Bowen positively spitting the words but this verse’s ending was disturbing in its quiet intensity. The final verse returned to the opening hypnotic texture with the end powerful indeed. The final song, A clear midnight featured quite a short Whitman verse, but this was giving an intimate, lyric performance with Bowen’s affecting high tenor over a mobile accompaniment and a rather magical ending.

We ended with a short piece by Herbert Howells that, for the first time in the evening, brought all the performers together. An Old Man’s Lullaby is a setting of Thomas Dekker. Full of ravishing textures, a delightful way to end the celebration.